Slide Night!

Remember when your Mum and Dad and uncles and aunts dragged out that dusty box from the top shelf of the cupboard in the hallway?  Full of scratched 35mm slides and creased photos of  old holidays in the family car, and of you as a baby, and you began to cringe in anticipation of the impending embarrassment and boredom?

Well, I'm about to do that to you now. Of course, you don't have to sneak out of the room or pretend you're sick or asleep...

Before and After

Sometimes it's difficult to realise just how much progress we're making on the construction of the IT Park. So many delays, frustrations and wasted time due to events totally beyond our control. This is a very hard place to try and meet deadlines.

So I'm glad to have been photographing so much of the work here over the last 18 months. It makes me feel better to see where we started and what we've achieved in such a relatively short time. I started putting a few "then and now" pics together...

The beginning of the entrance road and the water feature...

The water feature seemed to stay at this stage forever...

...and forever...

    

I was itching to get in and clean up the rubble to create some garden areas...

This hillside needed to be cleared and covered to prevent a landslide. With the (paid!) help of some local graduate students, we succeeded. There's grass seed under the coconut-fibre cloth, which is just now beginning to germinate with the warmer weather and rains...we've also planted a row of blue pines along the top, and enough yellow banksia roses to spill right over the full length of the retaining wall...it should have complete grass-cover by October.

Same again here. There are now local blue pines, red and white rhododendrons and yellow honeysuckle planted, along with the grass seed.

View from my bedroom balcony in winter...and then again in spring with the apple blossoms bursting forth...

These pics were taken approximately 12 months apart...not from the same POV, but I'm sure you'll get the idea...not too bad at all. I feel much happier now!